The goal of this paper – which can be found here – is to examine ‘whether market-based penalties for nonexecutive officials [more specifically, independent board members] in firms involved in price-fixing are significant in shaping their behaviours.’ The reason to focus on independent board members is that they ‘are highly sensitive to market sanctions (for example, in the form of reputational losses). Importantly, directors have powers not only to order internal investigations but also to require officers and employees to cooperate with prosecutors. In some cases, boards also establish special committees and appoint outside counsel to consider applications for leniency. As a result, they constitute a set of corporate insiders whom antitrust policies can exploit in designing prosecution policies.’ The paper is structured as follows: Second 2 begins by providing an overview of US and EU regimes for cartel prosecution and leniency. It also describes the role of corporate boards in cartel investigations. In the US: ‘Once the corporation learns…

Starting from the observation that, over the last 30 years, antitrust / competition law has had a rate of adoption across the world almost without parallel in the history of economic regulation, this article – which can be found here – examines one particular aspect of the global adoption of competition law systems: what jurisdictions must do to build the institutions needed for effective competition law implementation, and in particular, to develop programs that improve economic performance. The underlying assumption is that “improvements in institutional arrangements [i.e. institutional design and policy implementation] tend to yield superior policy outcomes.” The article is structured as follows: Part II sets out the major assumptions that underpin the theory outlined in the article. These assumptions are based on “a large and growing body of literature on the development of new competition law systems”, on “a benchmarking project undertaken by the George Washington [which] has collected information about ten major institutional characteristics for the world’s 130 competition…